INhonolulu Magazine Issue #15 - March 2014 | Page 26
it was still pretty cool. Everyone loved
it. That was when I first started started
thinking about modding games and
getting in to game development—in
8th grade [laughs].”
Robertson also wanted to be a DJ
when he was young, explaining an
early fascination with electronically produced music. When everyone
else in middle school was listening to
rap, pop, alternative or jawaiian music, Robertson was already addicted
to techno.
“When I was a kid, my parents
bought me this DJ toy called Mixman
Studio—it was a little plastic MIDI
controller with fake turn-tables and
sample buttons and stuff,” he laughs.
“It was actually pretty cool: You could
Profile / Trent Robertson
Electric Voodoo
Will Caron
Photos by Jimmy Edens
Engineer, programmer, composer, DJ and inventor: Trent
Robertson is a digital-age
renaissance man.
F
or Trent Robertson, there’s
something magical about the
creation and integration of
sound and light through electrical
signals. Since he began building his
own electronic devices, Robertson
has been fascinated with the idea of
combining his electrical engineering education with software writing
and musical composition to produce
amazing audio-visual displays.
“When I was about to graduate
from the undergraduate program, I
had an epiphany,” Robertson tells me
Page 26
during our interview in the Holmes
Hall fabrication lab on the University
of Hawai‘i at Mānoa campus. “I realized that audio is just an analog electric signal that oscillates, and if I filter
it and amplify it, I should be able to
light something up with that signal.”
A 3-D printer, a milling machine
and several other devices that are
lost on me whir and hum as Robertson shows me around his lab. Now a
graduate student tasked with running
the “fab lab” and teaching undergraduates how to use the machines, Robertson explains how he became head
of the lab.
“I was in the right place at the right
time, really,” says Robertson. “I only
moved into this lab because there was
a piece of machinery in here that I
needed for my research at the time.”
That piece of equipment is a
Semi-Conductor Parameter Analyzer
that Robertson was using for a contract
with the Navy to test their transistors.
“So I started working in this lab
and then, one day, this new milling
machine appeared,” he continues. “It
was actually purchased by a different
lab, HSFL (the Hawaii Space Flight
Laboratory), but they didn’t have a
place to put it. This lab is pretty big,
so they put it in here. I helped them
shoot a tutorial series on how to use it
and, therefore, I learned how to use it
too. It was in my space, I had the right
people teach me, and then I suddenly
became the only person using it.”
Now, Robertson has taken it upon
himself to mentor students on how
to design and fabricate circuits, as
well as how to maintain professional-grade, industrial equipment.
“My professor, Dr. David Garmire—
who was actually nominated for a
teaching excellence award this year—
was always confident in my ability to
create,” Robertson elaborates. “That’s
why he targeted me as an undergraduate to work for him in grad school.
“As an electrical engineer as
well, I know how to convert
between time-domain signals and frequency-domain
signals, meaning I can sample a bit of audio and r \